Quote from: YarkoL on November 06, 2014, 10:38:23 AM

Quote from: gjhiggins on November 05, 2014, 08:41:01 PM

I've been working on a possible scorecard, just for sh*ts and giggles:

http://minkiz.co/posting/

Premine scores positively?

It's a first cut, a work in progress. My main objective is to provoke thought and further questions (so, thank you); an aide-memoir presented with Minki's characteristic wry spin.

With respect to a big +10 for a premine: I'm attempting to acknowledge that IRL, ordinary, day-to-day coin logistics requires resourcing, somehow; DNS seed nodes don't pay for themselves per se, nor do nodes hosting block explorers.

The main issue with a premine is previous instances where an unscrupulous dev dumped the premine, trashing the price and effectively killing the coin. The risk of a repeat occurrence remains significant while devs are allowed to remain pseudonymous and I believe I can discern some small degree of hardening antipathy towards pseudonymity of devs.

As the consequences of this change of attitude begin to propagate across the domain, investors will gradually be able to regain some confidence that a specific premine will be responsibly curated because developers will be better able to demonstrate their integrity.

The recent No, no I'm the EQX dev!" episode has nicely illustrated the profoundly human problem of verifying personal identity in the absence of (the usual) validating social context. It's an abstract concept, increasingly difficult to implement canonically IRL and impossible to achieve (with the same degree of confidence) in bitspace. Fortunately, with the intense interest in developing trustless (a misnomer, I caution you) devices, we may be able to make some practical progress towards reducing the risks.

I'm not ignoring the other issue that seems to attend premines, the matter of the amount. Different brand development strategies have different costs, what might be seen as a ludicrously large premine for an unprepossessing store of value coin might be seriously underpowered for a coin with an ambition to grow a significant global reach. Assessment has to be performed on a case-by-case basis, hence a mild positive 10.

More generally, from an investor's perspective ...

At the moment, we (collectively) have no reliable means of decentralising control over the fin logistics resources necessary to maintain a coin and, until such a means appears, this de facto centralisation will continue to present practical problems.

The same is true for the management and control of nonfin central resources such as control over the website domain reg, possession of the coin-specific private keys and, importantly, the rights to the IP that emerge from the result of collective efforts of the dev(s) and the community of coin adopters.

These issues cannot safely be left just hanging in the wind - the Mooncoin dev has stopped responding and theymos' response to can we take over the forum thread? is that the thread ownership cannot be transferred, another thread must be started. Not a show-stopper admittedly (this time) but a change in URL will have a deleterious effect on communication between p2p participants and on previous promotional efforts after coin adoption that were rash enough to quote URLs for resources maintained by third parties.

The demands that arise from this militate the creation of a self-organised, community-based solution (such as a not-for-profit supporting foundation) to which can be ceded control of centralised issues that cannot yet be devolved to a decentralised, trustless solution.

It's going to take time to achieve that transition and until then, I'm inviting assessors to challenge the received wisdom about premines and make their own informed assessment, taking into account the coin management's closely-argued, well-supported pitch.

Cheers

Graham